


Braiding

by GrowlGrowl



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Abuse, Angst, Bathing/Washing, Break down, Crying, Depression, F/M, Kylo's PoV, One-Sided Relationship, Rape/Non-con Elements, non-consensual nudity, prisoner
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-06
Updated: 2018-06-06
Packaged: 2019-05-18 21:28:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,866
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14860625
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GrowlGrowl/pseuds/GrowlGrowl
Summary: Kylo has won. The Resistance is gone and Rey is here with him. However, she is completely unresponsive and refuses to do the bare minimum of anything - including keeping herself clean. One day they both snap.





	Braiding

He’s visited her every night in her gilded room. He brings her dinner and tries to interact with her. After a few months she stopped screaming at him and throwing food and refusing to eat. Now she just lies in bed and withers away. Every night, right before he is about to leave, Rey uses a rubied hair clip to scratch a tally mark in the wall above her bedpost where he can clearly see every time he enters and be reminded that she sees this as a prison. His jaw clenches every time.

“You need to wash yourself,” he says. Her hair is greasy and tangled. It's starting to matte in some places. And her smell is atrocious.

She stays in bed and stares at the wall with a blank look on her face. Ignoring him is her preferred form of rebellion these days. The only option she has since his army effectively slaughtered the Resistance and every last friend she'd ever had.

“Lying in your own filth isn't going to help anything,” he’s been saying, “You’ll still be here - bathed or not.”

Every day she's dirtier. If Kylo took what he wanted from her than he would think this would be some defense mechanism to make herself repulsive to him. But he hasn't touched her.

He can feel her loneliness but she won't talk. Years on Jakku have prepared her for this war of attrition.

The key to things like this lie in patience and persistence, which are two of Kylo’s weaknesses. After a long day of meetings, reading reports, delegating tasks to the most competent and loyal commanders, and sidestepping all attempts at treachery, he doesn't want to go to Rey’s room and sit on her bed and smell her stink and try reasoning at a vandalized wall. However if he is going to get Rey to start seeing him the way he wants her to see him then he must go every day that he can.

Perhaps today was a bad day for it though.

It's the twenty-first day of her bathing strike and Hux corrected him - saving him from making a strategic blunder - and it was in front of half of his commanders. It's a bad day. The kind of day he wishes he could gather up the girl from the hut in his arms and kiss her and have her kiss him back. Instead he comes upon the exact same unbathed, unresponsive  
scavenger that he's seen every night.

Before Kylo realizes what he's doing he goes to the en-suite bathroom and turns on the tub. It's halfway full when he goes back into the bedroom to see Rey sitting up.

She immediately starts backing up off the bed and away from his advancement as Kylo swoops to pick her up. Her fists, elbows, feet, and knees beat at him but he already had brute strength on his side and she hasn’t eaten a full meal in weeks. The bathroom door is slammed against the wall. As they approach the tub he rips her shirt open along the seams. Her panic becomes more focused and she starts actually aiming instead of simply thrashing. His crotch narrowly escapes her left heel before he uses the force to bind her. He sets her down. Unable to move Rey’s eyes widen as he pops the buttons from her pants.

Plenty of time has passed since their first encounter on Takodana and it’s much more difficult for Kylo to hold her still. His command of her slips momentarily and her legs kick and hands punch every ten or so seconds before again being immobilized.

“Stop fighting,” grits Kylo. “It’s just a fucking bath.”

“Don-... Plea-... stop…” Rey gets a screech in every time his control slips. She’s naked when he lets go of the binds, rapidly picking her up and dropping her into the tub. Even though the water was barely halfway it splashes onto the walls, the floor, and Kylo. She goes to stand but his hands push her back. One splayed hand keeps the struggling woman in the water while another pops open a shampoo bottle. He squeezes much more than necessary on her scalp.

“Ah!” She screams when it drips down her face.

“Close your eyes.” He lathers it up as much as he can with her trying to bob her head away from his one hand. Kylo’s just kind of patting it onto her head.

“That's enough!” He grabs both her arms so roughly she shrieks in pain and he doesn't care. He shakes her. “Stop struggling or I will get the Stormtroopers to hose you down every other day. Like a Show Bantha. Is that what you want to be? A fucking pet that can't take care of itself?”

In between hiccups she shakes her head. Her eyes are still closed and her face is devastated but she stays put. Kylo wets a washcloth in the sink and puts it to her face.

“Wipe your eyes with this.” And for the first time, she obeys.

The shampoo is piled on top of her head and he's afraid she's going to immediately wash it out so he goes back to working it through her hair. Although in a much gentler manner. His fingers run through what he can and when he approaches a knot, which is often, he softly works it loose. Some are too stubborn and require generous amounts of detangler. The task calms him. If she had been fighting the whole time he probably would have ripped out chunks of her hair and he sure that the only reason she’s allowing him to continue. That and if he’s the one washing her hair her arms are free to wrap around her knees in an attempt to hide her body from him.

He uses a cup from her untouched dinner tray to scoop up water and pour it slowly on her head. Kylo even leans her head back to avoid getting more soap in her eyes. Even though the water hasn’t gone cold, she shakes.

This is the first time she’s allowed herself to cry in front of him. Huge heaving sobs with gasping wails for breath. Even with her face partially wet he can distinguish between drops of water and her beautiful shining tears. Rey’s grip tightens on her thighs, still hiding her stomach and breasts even though she couldn’t possibly look more vulnerable than she does now. It gives him the same lightheaded feeling that he could expect from a cask of wine.

“Rey,” he says before rubbing a bar of soap on her exposed back. Rey sits in the stagnant water. Any tiny ripples come from her gasping from a particularly violent cry. “You’re so beautiful.”

Kylo only washes what he is able to reach and doesn’t ask for more. He may run the soap and water a few more times than necessary. He can’t remember a time he was this intimate with another person and he wants it to last.

At last he grabs the towel and tells her, “stand up.”

She does but only with her back facing him. He drapes the towel onto her shoulders as if honoring her with a fancy cloak. Rey hunches and holds the ends together. When she steps out she doesn’t bother drying her feet on a bathmat so water slops onto the floor in a trail leading toward the bedroom. Despite wanting to follow her Kylo decides to reward her with privacy and spends a few minutes watching the tub drain.

Rey is clothed in baggy, brown comfy sweats and sitting at the end of her bed. She really does look like a prisoner in such clothes, he realizes. He’ll have to talk to the person who supplies her closet. They have to have some colorful fabric lying around here somewhere? He’s sure she’d look remarkable in red.

Her hair is drying and she hasn’t made any effort to comb it. Sensing an opportunity Kylo retrieves the unopened set of combs from the bathroom. While she’s stopped crying Rey’s face is decidedly blank. She makes no move to get away as he sits behind her. Going one strand at a time Kylo starts at the bottom and gently tugs her hair straight. The only indications that she even registers what he’s doing is when she gives a tiny whimper as he works through an unrelenting knot.

It’s almost meditative like practicing saber forms or some other repetitive task that has been trained into his muscle memory. Her hair isn’t as thick as his but he spends as much time as he can possibly justify smoothing it out. Once finished with that he realizes that he can prevent her hair from knotting like that again by putting in braids.

Bruises are starting to appear on her arm from the shaking he had given her earlier. She’ll appreciate an Alderaanian style, he thinks. He racks his memory (in the most clinical manner) to remember the mornings he spent as a boy watching his mother do her hair. Once he’d gotten older she’d let him help her, if Han wasn’t around. Han Solo hated when his son was “being feminized.” But his long fingers, whilst good for making and fixing things, turned out to also be good for twisting complex designs into hair.

“This is an Alderaanian style. It was popular for a while even after Alderaan was gone. It’s trickier for people with thicker hair - you have to separate out a top and bottom layer and double plait it but your hair’s perfect for this.” He runs his fingers through, combs, braids, and twists for a long time. He hasn’t done this since he was a kid and it actually surprises him how much he remembers. Although throughout the years he’s lost practice so he’ll redo strands - sometimes several times - if it doesn’t come out completely straight or if the tension is too loose or too tight. He doesn’t want to risk it being too loose and her hair knotting anyway but he also fears that if it’s too tight she’ll take it out as soon as he steps out.

When he finally looks at a chronometer Kylo realizes he should have gone to sleep an hour ago. He puts the finishing ties onto the ends and wishes her a goodnight.

For the first time, she doesn’t scratch a tally mark into her wall. She sits on her bed and stares past him as if in a trance.

The next night she doesn’t speak but is still wearing the braids. And again the night after.

Kylo is determined that if Rey hasn’t bathed by the third day he’s going to run her another bath and he looks forward to it all day. He is very disappointed when he opens her door to find her wet, lank hair freshly washed and her clothed body smelling of Yovanga blossoms. The dress they gave her is a nice burgundy. He doesn’t try to start another one-sided conversation. He simply braids her hair.

The next morning Kylo orders the maintenance crew to spackle over Rey’s tally marks and paint the wall a refreshing color.

**Author's Note:**

> Hello!
> 
> This is my first Reylo fic although I've been working on a few for a while. Hopefully I'll get the other stories up in the next month or two.
> 
> Thanks for reading :)


End file.
